Twenty Years Later: My Morning Jacket Fires On All Electric Cylinders With ‘It Still Moves’

Twenty years ago, My Morning Jacket seemed to have set a template for its future work with the release of It Still Moves (released 9/9/03). Proof positive in hindsight is that dramatic songs like “Mageetah,” originally the stuff of legend at Bonnaroo performances around that time, still remain high points of the group’s concerts.

 It’s to the great credit of Jim James and company that they did not simply rehash the often-majestic high points of the group’s third LP. To that end, Lester Snell’s earthy but exalting horn arrangements of “Dancefloors,” and to a lesser extent “Easy Morning Rebel,” opened up possibilities for expanding the MMJ sound. 

However, the band chose to relegate such an authentically rootsy approach (a la Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main Street) to outside material. As a result, some eye- (and ear) opening covers of the Who, Prince and Wham! populated now famous concerts at Radio City Music Hall in New York City as well as shows two years later at the considerably smaller Big Apple venue Terminal 5. 

In place of a comparatively conventional approach to its evolution, My Morning Jacket produced a succession of experimental studio albums that now seem like nothing so much as dry runs for the titular leader’s later solo works like Regions of Light and Sound of God,( the marked exception to which, not surprisingly, is the splendid homage to the late George Harrison, Tribute To). 

The Kentuckians’ chosen tack almost but not quite belies the courage they displayed on their epochal studio album. It’s brave enough to extend a track over nine minutes (“I Will Sing You Song”), but it’s doubly so to also allow the atmosphere so conjured to sink in completely via the strings on “Just One Thing.” That extravagant production touch also works equally well in the mesh of orchestration with the twang of electric guitars on “Steam Engine.”

The 2016 reissue of It Still Moves, in a form so markedly reconfigured from its cover art to its audio mix, might suggest the group (or at least its titular leader) had developed serious reservations about the album in its original form as a pinnacle of accomplishment. But apart from being indicative of the band’s errant ways, the vault release remains notable as the final appearances in MMJ for guitarist Johnny Quaid and keyboardist Danny Cash.

Carl Broemel and Bo Koster, respectively, stepped into those roles, thus taking part in subsequent tours, reaffirming the power of the group as captured on the recording. Even so, the pair’s tasteful yet substantive instrumental presence in the live setting hardly mitigated the progression (or lack thereof) in MMJ’s studio discography. 

While it’s understandable James and co. felt they had reached the logical conclusion of the approach they had honed on stage–captured in full on the live album Okonokos–2005’s Z likewise would’ve and should’ve fulfilled their experimental tendencies. Its successor, Evil Urges, smacks of dilettantism at worst and complacency at best, as if the intent was to test the loyalty of the audience to its limits.

To make matters worse, the incandescent likes of those two albums’ rare highlights are nowhere to be found on the later distinctly inferior LPs that followed. On both 2011’s Circuital and,  four years later,The Waterfall, My Morning Jacket sounds like a mere shadow of its former self. 

The quintet did retain formidable force on stage, but the growing dichotomy between the older and newer material could not have been more distinct as the years passed. In fact, by 2017, it was only during extended encores, featuring such tunes as “Run Thru,” that the group approached the heights of excitement that had previously prevailed virtually throughout their shows roughly a decade prior. 

To be fair, only the most mature artists realize the early rush of inspiration(s), as symbolized by It Still Moves, must inevitably give way to a different sort of diligence than first fueled their creativity. My Morning Jacket’s sequel to their 2015 effort, The Waterfall II, offered glimmers of such hope, but the anonymous nature of the 2021 eponymous long-player gives the lie to those powers of discernment. 

To once again scale the plateau attained two decades ago via It Still Moves, the fivesome might well take a cue from Bob Dylan. Around the time of Blood On The Tracks, the Bard talked about having ‘to learn to do consciously what he’d previously done unconsciously’ and his latter-day career resurgence would seem to lend credence to the theory. 

Perhaps more collective creative soul-searching by My Morning Jacket could pay similar dividends, so that on future milestone dates, the group’s best record will, in retrospect, stand as a harbinger of things to come rather than a symbol of glories past.

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